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Daily Archives: 5 August, 2009

The main project I work on, has an automated unit test application which is built and run as part of the build process. For our office, the team was an early adopter of the concept, but unfortunately this does not translate into extensive and well maintained set of unit tests. Put politely: it would be good to improve this coverage. This then raises a fairly obvious question: Where do you begin?
First of all, it is worth analysing the statement: “It would be good to improve this coverage”. There are a couple of benefits to having unit tests and these benefits help explain the statement.Avoidance of regression bugs. This is reasonably self-evident. If you have sufficient coverage of your classes, you cannot introduce faulty logic without a unit-test failing. Over the years many quality assurance staff have told me “the earlier you catch a bug, the less expensive it is to fix”. So many, in fact, that I now believe them. (In truth I don’t think I ever doubted the “earlier = cheaper” argument) Anyway, if you are running unit tests as part of the build process and building regularly it stands to reason that any bugs introduced and caught, will be fixed cheaply.Code re-use. A less obvious benefit is that the code you are testing now has two uses. One in the application and one in the test-case. While this may seem a contrived second use, it should help with code abstraction. The theory goes that the more usages a class has, the less chance it has of being tightly coupled with other classes. Tightly coupled classes increase code complexity. The more tightly coupled they are, the more likely a change in one class will introduce a regression bug in another class.
Now that we have defined a couple of benefits that we hope to achieve through the use of unit tests, it helps define where we should begin. We want the unit tests to reduce instances of regression bugs and improve code abstraction – which is enforced by re-use. History logs of the revision control system can be studied to show the frequency of changes in a unit. If a mature project has a hot-spot of continual changes to a given class, then that may well be an indicator of frequent regressions and “hopeful” changes rather than “thoughtful” changes.

There is a very good chance that such a class violates rules of the single responsibility principal and in turn makes writing unit tests for it an unviable proposition. Now that we have identified what is wrong, we have a good place to start:

Look through the class and identify the different responsibilities the class has.

Extract the responsibility that is least entangled throughout the class.

Write unit tests for this new class.

Rinse, repeat.

Once you have extracted a new class and written the unit tests, your changes for it are not necessarily complete. As you extract more classes, there is a chance that your new class can be further decoupled from the original. In my experience, the important thing to remember is that just because you remove a responsibility from a class does not immediately decouple the two classes. Proper decoupling can take several iterations.As I stated, start with the easy abstractions first. As classes become less entangled, the harder areas will become easier to deal with. At least, that’s the theory!